In order to use a peripheral device, such as a scanner device, which is an information reading apparatus, through an information processing apparatus, it is necessary to install a specific device driver for the peripheral device (a scanner driver, in the case where the peripheral device is a scanner device). Accordingly, if a plurality of scanner devices are used, it is necessary to install the same number of scanner drivers as there are scanner devices, and therefore for each scanner device, it is necessary for a user to perform a cumbersome installation operation by checking the IP address and finding a scanner driver for the scanner device.
In view of this, recently, research and development of an OS/general scanner driver that can be used in any scanner device regardless of the type of scanner device are being carried out. For example, a method has been proposed in which a scan process is performed by selecting an available network scanner device after a scan instruction has been issued from an application to the OS/general scanner driver. According to this method, it is possible to use all scanner devices supported by the OS/general scanner driver simply by preinstalling only the OS/general scanner driver in an information processing apparatus. Also, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2009-145970 proposes a system in which when a management server receives a network participation message in unicast from a device, a driver for that device is push installed in each client PC, and thereby the usage environment is constructed and managed.
Furthermore, a system has been recently proposed in which a network-compliant scanner driver performs a pseudo push scan function as a specific scan mode that can be easily used in USB interface-compliant scanner devices. “Pseudo push scan” is the name of a scan operation that transmits image data from a scanner device to an information processing apparatus as if pushing the data to the information processing apparatus. The internal operations are as follows. In response to a user operation, an event signal for commencing the scan operation is transmitted from the scanner device to the information processing apparatus, and the information processing apparatus that has received the event signal acquires image data via the scanner driver. A pseudo push scan system can be constructed on a network by configuring the network interface-compliant scanner device and scanner driver to adapt to the internal operations of the pseudo push scan.
However, the conventional technology has the following problems. For example, the OS/general scanner driver as described above in the BACKGROUND ART generates and transmits commands in a format that can be processed by all of the corresponding scanner devices, and therefore has limited functions compared to a dedicated scanner driver specialized for a scanner device. Furthermore, these days, the pseudo push scan is increasingly performed in a mixed scan environment in which a plurality of scanner drivers, including a general scanner driver and a dedicated scanner driver, and applications are combined. This raises the possibility of the user experiencing confusion in deciding whether the general scanner driver or the dedicated scanner driver should be preferentially used when making a selection. Furthermore, in order to switch this setting, it is necessary to change the settings of the information processing apparatus in advance, and therefore the selection operation is an inefficient and laborious operation for the user.